May is always a time filled with special occasions and opportunities for the Guild, and we have a lot to share with you this month, so keep reading!

Upcoming Events and Invitations:

In our last missive, we mentioned that one of our board members had been working with New York City Council to have Brooklyn’s Pineapple Street (the site of Dorothy’s birthplace) ceremonially named in her honor. We are delighted to announce that a sign re-naming the street “Dorothy Day Way” will be unveiled TOMORROW, Saturday, May 2nd, 2026 at 11:00 AM. 

You are warmly invited to join us for the ceremony, which will take place at the corner of Henry and Pineapple Streets in Brooklyn, and will be followed by a light reception at Assumption Church Hall (55 Cranberry Street).

We know this is a little last-minute, but please come celebrate with us, and bring a friend! We are so excited that the city is recognizing Dorothy’s historic, as well as her cultural and spiritual significance for the life of New York in this way. All are welcome!

Over in Manhattan, we also have a few upcoming walking pilgrimages, on Sunday May 3rd, Saturday May 16th, Sunday May 17th, and Saturday May 30th, all at 2:00 PM. At the moment, the first two dates are full, but we have plenty of room on May 17th and May 30th! Please click here to register (for free!), and feel free to contact us if you’d like to be added to a waiting list for earlier dates. The weather in New York is beautiful right now, so if you have time, make a day of it and head down to Whitehall to ride the Dorothy Day Staten Island Ferry.

We are also looking forward to hosting our annual Easter-season webinar in just over two weeks! Please join us on Sunday, May 17th from 1:30-3:00 PM Eastern for “Writing Dorothy Day: Perspectives from Four Recent Biographers” to hear from Kate Hennessy, author of Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty: An Intimate Portrait of My Grandmother, D.L. Mayfield, author of Unruly Saint: Dorothy Day's Radical Vision and Its Challenge for Our Times, and Blythe Randolph and John Loughery, co-authors of Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century. 

This webinar will be hosted by our Guild chair, Dr. Kevin Ahern. Register for free using this form.

Looking further ahead into the summer, the Guild will also be taking part in some other exciting events in New York and the Midwest. Next month, on the Feast of Corpus Christi, which this year takes place on June 7th, the Dorothy Day Guild will join parishes and other Catholic groups from across New York City for a peaceful march grounded in the Catholic social tradition in support of immigrant communities. Organized under the auspices of Catholics in Communion, the march will begin at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola (980 Park Avenue) after the 11:00 AM Mass on Sunday, June 7th. We’ll have additional information available in next month’s missive in the first week of June, but plan to march with us on Corpus Christi!

In July, the Dorothy Day Guild will be participating in the “American Saints Exhibit” hosted by the Shrine of Our Lady of Champion, in Champion, Wisconsin. This exhibit is part of a celebration of American saints and holy people in honor of the United States’ 250th anniversary. The Shrine is hosting a series of events from July 1st-July 9th which will include speakers, Mass and other opportunities for prayer, a walk through the American Saints exhibit booths, and a picnic!

Our Lady of Champion Shrine is the site of the only approved Marian apparition in the United States, so this is a really special place to pray, and the grounds are beautiful. The Shrine is working with more than seventy different canonization causes, shrines, and guilds, for this celebration and we are so honored to be included! In the coming month, we’ll let you know when representatives from our Guild will be present so you can come say hello!

Other news from the Guild:

Our collaborative preservation project cataloguing and mapping Dorothy’s room at Maryhouse is continuing! Over the past year and a half, we’ve had a team of volunteers working closely with members of the New York Catholic Worker community to document and preserve Dorothy’s material legacy. When Dorothy died in 1980, her personal artefacts– her books, photographs, framed prints, collections, and clothing– remained in the bedroom she had occupied for the last several years of her life. Working with the community to sort and track the provenance of these items has been an educational, enlightening, and surprisingly tender experience. Sometime this summer, we’ll have an exciting update for researchers and members of the public on this topic, so stay tuned!

As we’ve undertaken this work, we’ve encountered a number of interesting and unexpected items, but perhaps the most important of these has been a note from Mother Teresa of Kolkata to Dorothy, which Dr. Kevin Ahern found tucked between the pages of one of Dorothy’s Bibles in September of 2023. The note, written on a small prayer card, reads:

“Dear Dorothy,

My love, prayer, and sacrifice is close to you. If you go to Jesus first, tell Him I love Him. If I go, I will tell Him you love Him.

God bless you.

M. Teresa”

On the back of the card, Dorothy had written her own prayer list, adding intentions for their mutual friend, Eileen Egan and her family, Catholic Worker families in houses of hospitality and on farms, and readers, writers, and benefactors of the newspaper. The authenticity of the note, in Mother Teresa’s own handwriting, has been verified by the Missionaries of Charity sisters in Rome, and right now, we are working with a museum preservation specialist in South Bend, IN to preserve and create a display for this beautiful relic of two holy women and spiritual friends. 

While we are awaiting the arrival of the archival-quality materials to mount and frame this note, many people in South Bend have had the chance to pray with it. In honor of the twentieth anniversary of Our Lady of the Road, a drop-in center that is an apostolate of the St. Peter Claver Catholic Worker community, Bishop Kevin Rhoades of the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend celebrated a special Mass in the community’s Chapel of the Holy Spirit where the relic was present.

Bishop Rhoades had previously served as a chaplain to the Missionaries of Charity in Rome and shared several personal stories of encounters with Mother Teresa and how he had been touched by her powerful spirituality. We are so pleased that everyone gathered for the occasion was able to pray with Dorothy and Mother Teresa and we look forward to prominently displaying this relic in the Dorothy Day Center at Manhattan University when the preservation work is finished!

Art, Prayer, and Reading Recommendations:

For May, we have a few shorter items to share with you. First, the USCCB has created a collection of resources for the season, entitled “Seven Weeks of Easter, Seven Themes of Catholic Social Teaching” with printable inserts for parish bulletins for each week. The fifth Sunday of Easter, which takes place on May 3rd, has been designated as the Sunday honoring the option for the poor and vulnerable.

The bulletin insert references Dorothy and includes this quote from her: “How do we know we indeed have faith? Because we have seen His hands and His feet in the poor around us. He has shown Himself to us in them.”

We encourage you to pray with these resources and use them in your parish or classroom!

The Spring 2026 issue of the Conventual Franciscan Friars, Province of Our Lady of Consolation, includes a new painting of Dorothy and a reflection by artist Vincent Petersen, OFM Conv. 

Describing the process of writing this contemporary icon, Fr. Vincent said, 

Our thanks to the Friars for sharing this new image and for all the work they do for peace and the dignity of the poor, especially in this Franciscan Jubilee Year marking the 800th anniversary of the death of St. Francis. 

Finally, on Saturday, The Guardian published an article on progressive Christian activism in the United States and the work of Catholic and Protestant Christians alike for disarmament, anti-war, and pro-immigrant causes. Author Lex McMenamin interviews members of multiple Catholic Worker communities and the Dorothea Project for this piece and notes that this tradition of action grounded in the Gospel is “decades, if not centuries, old,” and that Dorothy, “was arrested dozens of times protesting against war and marching with farmworkers.”

We are so grateful for the work that our brothers and sisters across the country are doing to defend the security and dignity of the most vulnerable at home and abroad, in so many different areas of concern. We are sure that Dorothy is with you and extending her prayers of intercession over your works of mercy.

Prayer requests:

This month, we’d like to ask you to join us in praying with Dorothy for La Sagrada Familia Community, the new Catholic Worker house of hospitality that has recently opened in New Hampshire. Bethany Hobbs and Duncan Hilton opened La Sagrada Familia in late 2025 in Keene, NH, with a special calling to serve the Spanish-speaking migrant community in their area. Please hold them in prayer as they settle into their new home and put down deeper roots in their community. You can learn more about La Sagrada Familia and their work in this profile from Roundtable.

Magdalena Muñoz Pizzulic, our 2025 Dorothy Day Guild Graduate Research Fellow, has asked for our prayers in her job search. She is hoping to move from Chile to New York in order to continue her academic research on Dorothy and the Catholic Worker movement, and is looking for work in creative and Church-adjacent fields. Please join us in asking Dorothy to intercede on her behalf for this worthy endeavor (and if you have good leads, reach out to us!).

Last, but certainly not least, we received some wonderful news which a friend from the Catskills shared with us. T. wrote last week,

“I prayed to Dorothy while an 8-month-pregnant family member was on an emergency life-flight to Springfield, IL children's hospital. She had pre-eclampsia & it wasn't clear if she and/or the baby would make it. She delivered her baby son (via Caesarean section) on Sunday, April 19th. He came into the world 7 weeks premature & weighed 3 lbs, 5 oz. Mama is doing fine, has to stay at least 3 weeks in the hospital to recover.”

We are so glad to hear that this little family is doing well! It is really a joy to receive updates like this in response to prayers answered and graces or favors received. If you or someone you know would like to be added to our Guild’s prayer list, please let us know.

A few words from Dorothy:

Dorothy chose the date for the publication of the first issue of The Catholic Worker to coincide with the commemoration of International Workers Day, celebrated every year since 1890 on May 1st. The day is traditionally marked by the combination of joyful festivities and activism which has come to characterize the Catholic Worker movement as a whole. 

In The Long Loneliness, Dorothy reflects on the Catholic Worker’s heritage of solidarity with both working people and the destitute, those who have no work and may have lost hope of finding any. “We have lived with the unemployed, the sick, the unemployables,” she writes in the chapter “Labor.”

“The contrast between the worker who is organized and has his union, the fellowship of his own trade to give him strength, and those who have no organization and come to us on a breadline is pitiable.

They are stripped then, not only of all earthly goods, but of spiritual goods, their sense of human dignity. When they are forced into line at municipal lodging houses, in clinics, in our houses of hospitality, then they are truly destitute. Over and over again in our work, many young men and women who come as volunteers have not been able to endure it and have gone away. To think that we are forced by our own lack of room, our lack of funds, to perpetuate this shame, is heartbreaking…

‘All men are brothers.’ How often we hear this refrain, the rallying call that strikes a response in every human heart. These are the words of Christ, ‘Call no man master, for ye are all brothers.’ It is a revolutionary call which has even been put to music. The last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony has that great refrain– ‘All men are brothers.’ Going to the people is the purest and best act in Christian tradition and revolutionary tradition and is the beginning of world brotherhood.”

This is the truth at the heart of the Gospel, and as Dorothy notes, at the heart of all truly revolutionary activity. God is a Father to all of humanity; we are all members of one family, one Body. To those who take action today for the common good on behalf of working men and women, on behalf of the truly destitute, and on behalf of all of their brothers and sisters, thank you! Your works of mercy, both corporal and spiritual, build up the family that Christ instituted and Dorothy spent her life serving. We wish each of you a happy International Workers’ Day, a happy Feast of St. Joseph the Worker, and a happy birthday to the Catholic Worker movement!

In peace,

Dr. Casey Mullaney, on behalf of the Dorothy Day Guild